Truth and Eternity

Totalitarianism 4

My secondary school years were not very pleasant. I was isolated and often the target of bullying. When I finally spoke to an adult, I was only told that I should fight back, but I was never helped. There was no world for me outside of school, so I continued to go there despite feeling hopeless. If I were to meet a child in the same situation today, I would tell them that they should stop going to their school if it was killing them. Now that I am an adult, I know that there is a vast world out there. But I didn't know that, so the whole world felt like a closed place, like a living hell.

I went to an integrated middle and high school, but the bullying stopped when I got to high school. It was a strange feeling. Nothing had changed for me personally, but I had been the target of bullying and it stopped. It reminded me of a girl I had seen in my primary school who had been isolated. There was no reason why she should be attacked. Perhaps it is a kind of group dynamic. I was the target of several attacks and the bullying mechanism was much the same. First, there is one central figure who attacks the target. Gradually, the people around him or her would fall in line and a one-versus-many structure would form in the closed group. I felt more threatened by the many children who were sympathizing with that atmosphere than by the central attacker. There may have been some conflict in the beginning in them. But at some point they gave up thinking and seemed to be controlled by a greater force. Teacher and my parents told me to fight back, but I didn't want to attack them back, because it seemed that if I attacked them back, I would be swept up in that wave too. I felt that once I was caught in that wave, I would lose something important as a human being.

Teachers did not seem to know how to intervene in this matter, and no sanctions were ever imposed on the pupils who took part in the bullying.
At the time, I often wondered why there was no clear provision for bullying in this school, while shoplifting was punishable by expulsion. In most cases, shoplifting does not cost lives. However, in the case of bullying, the life of the victim child is often severely disrupted. They can be scarred for life or even killed. However, no legitimate means of bringing this to justice has been established.